being spotted in a restaurant by someone he knew, Jersey was so small after all...he would keep the takeaway plain – no Indian food – he wouldn’t want to risk the smell of curry on his clothes, on his breath.
‘Okay, well –’ I said, but he’d rung off.
I stood in the centre of the kitchen and looked at the potatoes shivering in a pan of water on the hob. It had taken me over half an hour to peel them. I had thought that Graham and Daniel would be home for tea, but I should have known better than to make that presumption. Daniel was often out these days – with friends, girlfriends, it was hard to know. He didn’t communicate much with me these days, sometimes just an occasional grunt- and Graham was rapidly becoming just as unreliable.
I hadn’t minded peeling the potatoes. I never did. I found it therapeutic, slicing into the thick, leathery skin, shucking off the earthy blemishes that looked to me like liver spots on an old man’s hands. Another pan stood on the hob; carrots and peas floating on a sea of salted water. I had planned to do a home-made chicken kiev, to go with the vegetables and the potatoes. I had been trying to decide how to do the potatoes – roasted whole, or cut into chunky wedges, or maybe even lightly sautéed. I had cut into the cold knobbled skin of the chicken breasts, folding it back and stuffing in the herbed garlic butter. Extra garlic, it was a touch of vindictiveness on my part, to send Graham to the office, stinking of garlic, I had hoped he would breathe it all over that bitch.
I could feel chives under my fingernails...I stared at the raw chicken breasts and reached for a knife. I slowly pierced the greasy skin and watched as the butter seeped from the hole like a suppurating wound, and I thought again of the blood dripping down the man’s face.
Then I carefully picked up the chicken breasts, squeezed them hard, and threw them in the bin.
***
The local evening news did not mention the man’s death. The presenter did talk about a finance company that had closed, with the loss of eighty-four jobs, so perhaps that was more important. They still had time for the weather, though, they always had time for that. The weather forecaster said that tomorrow would see a lot of rain, indeed a heavy storm was ‘very likely’ but they weren’t usually very accurate, so...it wasn’t the usual weather forecaster, instead it was a man called Colin Flood, which I thought was a good example of “nominative determinism”. I had heard about nominative determinism on a game show – one of those erudite BBC2 ones – whereby your name can have an effect on the job that you end up choosing. There had to be some truth in it as I remember flicking through the yellow pages of the phonebook once and spotting a gardener called Matthew Weed.
The usual weather forecaster was a woman called Catherine. Maybe she was on holiday again. She always looked tanned , like she went on a lot of sunny holidays, and she had deep blue eyes that twinkled in her honey-dewed face. Although it could be fake tan I suppose, a lot of women did that these days, though most of them went too far - why anyone thought the colour orange was a good choice of skin colour was beyond me. Catherine seemed very nice, she smiled all the time, and it didn’t look fake, it looked like she really meant it when she said ‘that’s all from me, I hope you all have a lovely evening’.
I didn’t like this forecaster. His smile looked forced, it didn’t reach his eyes, and there were too many teeth in that smile. He reminded me of a cartoon cat leering over a trapped mouse. He was handsome, but in a smug, bland way. Over-confident. Maybe he thought he was famous, being on the TV, and it had gone to his head.
I sighed and looked at the clock, even though I knew what time it was, as if I needed the reassurance of the clock face for confirmation. The daily grind of soap operas was about to start. Sometimes they would be on in the background, but most times I would press mute. I didn’t watch any of them. I couldn’t deal with all of the arguing, all of that noise that